I took the liberty of going through the new GQ article on Colin Powell and noting some of the best quotes. None of the quotes below are from Powell, most if not all are from one of his closest friends and confidants:
"This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that."
"He's tired. Mentally and physically."
The chasm that has emerged between State and Defense over the past three years is wider than it has been at any point in recent history, a division that transcends anything remotely healthy or useful. It is no longer just a difference of strategy and logistics but of fundamental values, principles, and philosophy.
"I can tell you firsthand that there is a tremendous barrier between Cheney and Powell, and there has been for a long time. It's like McCain saying that his relations with the president are 'congenial,' meaning McCain doesn't tell the president to go fuck himself every time."
"Condi's a jerk."
"He has spent as much time doing damage control and, shall we say, apologizing around the world for some less-than-graceful actions as he has anything else."
It's easy to talk about "ending states" when you've never been sent to end one, when you've never watched a man split apart in a rain of shrapnel. But for an old grunt who's been on the front lines, who tromped through the elephant grass in Vietnam, who took a punji stake through the foot and saw ears cut off as trophies, who had slept beneath the aching odor of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum stuffed with burning human feces, for a man like Colin Powell, the path of diplomacy had a battle-born allure that no draft-dodging neocon could possibly comprehend, and he meant for them to know it.
"I make no bones about it. I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. Richard Perle's cavalier remarks about doing this or doing that with regard to military force always, always troubled me. Because it just showed me that he didn't have the appreciation, for example, that Colin Powell has for what it means."
"I call them utopians," he said. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."
"It hasn't worked in Cuba for forty years," I said. "Dumbest policy on the face of the earth," he said. "It's crazy."
"He's tired. Mentally and physically. And if the president were to ask him to stay on - if the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years."
